Kiss the Sky
by Audra Lachesis
Summary: Sixteen-year-old John Sheppard. High school physics. Ferris wheels. Hee. written for the sga flashfic 'School' challenge


**Title:** Kiss the Sky

**Challenge:** school

**Summary:** John Sheppard. High school physics. Ferris wheels. Hee.

**A/N:** Based on one of my old high school physics labs, so not entirely my fault. Also, I in turn blame chasingkerouac, since this is meant to be a sort of companion fic to her recently posted Rodney challenge. Title taken from U2's 'Mysterious Ways' ('If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel, on your knees boy...')

**ETA:** Written prior to the season 4 episode 'Outcast', in which Sheppard's family is briefly introduced; thus this story is now officially AU.

***

_1983_

John Sheppard was a disappointment in every sense of the word, at least according to his father. He was already sixteen years old, with 'no sense of direction, and precious little self-motivation'. All his attempts to point out that 'no sense of direction' was sort of the _point_ of being sixteen were met with hard glares and clipped demands to go upstairs and do something useful for a change, instead of blaring that God-awful garbage he called music.

John's father was used to barking out orders, and expected them to be followed to the letter. He was retired military, after all, a colonel in the Marine Corps, and he'd been damned good at his job. His retirement hadn't been entirely voluntary, either, a fact that he never failed to emphasize when John was being particularly mulish. "Entirely too much like your mother," he'd tell his son darkly, eyes narrowed. "And look at what happened to _her_."

John's mother had died of cancer when he was six, so he wasn't really sure what that had to do with anything. All he knew was that one day he'd been sneaking up to the roof to test his pillowcase parachutes, and the next he was in the hospital with his mother as she kissed him goodbye. And she'd never gotten to see his finely honed parachuting skills, either, more's the pity.

So John was raised by his father, who really had no idea how to go about raising a kid, but had the idea that it should probably be approached like an extended cadet training program, push and push and push and see if the plebe breaks. And if he doesn't, it makes him strong and a fighter and a _man_, and wasn't that the point?

Since his old man was so difficult to please, John had long since given up trying. Puberty had gifted him with a deeper voice, an impressive growth spurt, and an 'attitude problem' in the form of dry sarcasm. It rapidly became second nature for John to slouch in his seat, stretch out his legs, and paste on a lazy, smug grin that he knew just drove his dad nuts. Leaving his shirt untucked and his hair sticking up in all directions didn't help, either, but that was, again, sort of the point.

School was no different. The more his father pushed him to study, to participate in sports, to project this shining image of the All-American Boy, the more John resisted. He didn't play any sports at all, although he perked up suspiciously at any and all discussions of football. He made decent grades, but nothing impressive enough to draw attention to himself. John was the kid at the back of the classroom, hunched over in his seat with a bored expression on his face and an intricate, half-folded paper airplane nestled in the pages of his textbook. If he'd bothered to pay attention and actually study, he might've been an excellent student, one of the best, perhaps. But that would've been what his father wanted, setting John on his way to the US Naval Academy like a good little Marine brat, and damned if he'd conform to the old man's vision of the perfect son.

Perfection was hard enough to achieve, after all, but it was impossible to maintain.

***

John folded his hands over his stomach, stretched out his legs, and rested his chin on his chest, the very picture of teenage boredom. It wasn't that he wanted school to be over already or anything, it was just that he found physics to be one of the most mind-numbing subjects on the face of the planet. John didn't particularly care why the apple fell, as long as it continued to do so with predictable regularity. He vaguely noted that the pudgy science teacher at the head of the classroom was droning on about centripetal acceleration, and turned his attention back to studying the toes of his shoes.

"Mr. Sheppard, since you seemed to be so enthralled with your footwear, perhaps _you'd_ like to explain to the class the details of this afternoon's lab exercise?" Mr. Overton fixed John with a steely glare.

"State fair lab," John piped up, not even bothering to lift his head. "An excuse for us all to ride the rides and sneak cotton candy while pretending to measure acceleration and centripetal whatsit and that thing that makes the skin on your face go all flappy at high speeds."

Mr. Overton looked pained. "I highly doubt any of you will be pulling that many g-forces on the pirate ship, Mr. Sheppard." John gave a 'you-never-know' shrug and picked a piece of lint idly from his sleeve, but managed to keep the smug grin off his face. He tuned out the rest of the lecture -- no open-toed shoes, treat the equipment carefully, safety first, blahblahblah -- and wondered if he could manage to use the laws of physics to skip sixth period altogether.

***

John's lab partner was cute, he had to give her that. Damned if he could remember her name, though -- Becca or Becky or Babsie or something. Hell, he just called her 'Barbie' to make things easier, although he got a pretty hateful glare out of her for that. Rule number one of physics labs: don't piss off your lab partner, on the remote chance that he (or she) is the type that likes to do everything him (or her)self. He'd have to buy her a caramel apple later to make up for it.

The bus ride to the fairgrounds was uneventful, at least, as most of the other students were dutifully testing their accelerometers and scribbling in lab notebooks. John's was folded into his back pocket, badly creased, and filled with his illegible scrawl, which may or may not have been actual physics equations. The world may never know.

The physics department had finagled their admission, along with a ration of tickets for the rides, which Mr. Overton doled out to each of the students in turn. After being subjected to the portly professor's insistence that they all meet back at the entrance in two hours with all their measurements and calculations completed, the class scattered, with each pair of students heading for a different ride (and some few of them discreetly disregarding the rides altogether in favor of the Midway).

John didn't even bother checking with Barbie before making a beeline for the ferris wheel.

He wasn't even sure _why_ he liked ferris wheels so much, really. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it had been the only ride his mother would agree to go on with him. She avoided the roller coasters her husband preferred like the plague; "I don't see any reason to risk seeing my lunch again -- I like it just fine where it is, don't you, Johnny?" she'd tell him, and let him grab her hand and haul her bodily up the ramp into the waiting car.

Or maybe it was just the feeling of leaving the world behind, if only for a few moments, and looking down on everyone and everything below. Above and separate. Surveying from on high. Everything visible, and invisible to everyone. The faceless observer.

Granted, that sort of effect was significantly dampened when sharing the car with a pretty blonde who babbled about ratios of apparent weight as she fiddled with the accelerometer and doodled bizarre diagrams in her lab notebook. John glanced at her calculations and shrugged slightly. He could spout off whatever she was doing easily enough if Mr. Overton badgered him, so he settled in to enjoy the ride, making non-committal noises at the appropriate times as Barbie worked.

The ride slowed to a stop predictably, with the pair of them at the very apex of the circle, and John snuck a glance down at the people below. It was like watching a collective of intelligent ants, all of them scurrying in different directions on their own appointed tasks, oblivious to the eyes in the sky...

They jerked into motion once more, and John was so intent on his study of the people below that it caught him off guard. He barely had a chance to enjoy the weightlessness of their descent before they were climbing again. John frowned thoughtfully as he stared at the little weighted spring in Barbie's hands. 'Ratios of apparent weight', hmm? Scientific gobbledygook, really. For that brief moment of decreased apparent weight as the car started down, it felt like -- almost like flying.

And if it was fun on a ferris wheel, what might it be like to fly for real? Just like that, John was back on the porch roof, filled with six-year-old glee as he gripped the corners of his pillowcase and shouted, "Watch me, Mommy! Mommy, watch me!"

Playing at parachutes was nothing. _Ferris wheels_ were nothing. It must be a hundred times better to have that sort of power over freefall, to control drag and lift with the push of a lever or the twist of a wrist. His father had one buddy in the Corps who was airborne, and he'd always said it took a crazy bastard to fly Hornets, almost as cracked as those Air Force punks with their F-16s.

In retrospect, John could never be sure which came first: the irresistible urge to sprout his own wings, or the fiendish idea of a way to truly infuriate his dad and still get exactly what he wanted. Needless to say, he startled poor Barbie half to death when he started laughing for absolutely no reason, and she gave him an impatient look as she steadied her hands hastily.

"Care to share?" she asked dryly, clamping down on her irritation as she squinted at the vertical accelerometer once more.

"Nope," John answered, flashing her a cheeky grin. "Here, I'll take that. You finish up those time period calculations, I'll fill in the rest of the table." He appropriated the instrument from her swiftly, ignoring the flabbergasted expression on her face, and picked up exactly where she'd left off without batting an eyelash. When she didn't recover immediately, he lifted one dark eyebrow, the picture of innocence. "The faster we finish, the more time we have for sneaking cotton candy," he reminded her solemnly, and was rewarded with a twitch of her lips that just might have been the beginnings of an amused smile. As John read and recorded their measurements with a deft hand, he hid a grin of his own.

Lieutenant John Sheppard, US Air Force. It had a helluva ring to it, he had to admit.

***

END


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